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Reddit-Quoting Alexa Tells a User: 'Kill Your Foster Parents' (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:
An Amazon customer got a grim message last year from Alexa, the virtual assistant in the company's smart speaker device: "Kill your foster parents." The user who heard the message from his Echo device wrote a harsh review on Amazon's website, Reuters reported -- calling Alexa's utterance "a whole new level of creepy". An investigation found the bot had quoted from the social media site Reddit, known for harsh and sometimes abusive messages, people familiar with the investigation told Reuters. The odd command is one of many hiccups that have happened as Amazon tries to train its machine to act something like a human, engaging in casual conversations in response to its owner's questions or comments.
And Alexa also can't tell a human voice from a parrot, according to a Huffington Post story shared by PolygamousRanchKid: Rocco, an African grey, was caught using the virtual assistant to play his favorite music, tell jokes and even order snacks, The Times of London reports. Thankfully the device's parental lock system prevented the clever boy from actually purchasing any items which included strawberries, ice cream and even a kettle.
And Alexa also can't tell a human voice from a parrot, according to a Huffington Post story shared by PolygamousRanchKid: Rocco, an African grey, was caught using the virtual assistant to play his favorite music, tell jokes and even order snacks, The Times of London reports. Thankfully the device's parental lock system prevented the clever boy from actually purchasing any items which included strawberries, ice cream and even a kettle.
We haven't met his foster parents. Alexa might have been on to something.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Okay, I'll kill kenny for you.
When we make it act like a human it tries to coerce mertbags to kill.... suddenly teslas scare me, in fact anything IoT that can move, ugh imagine a sentient AI just waiting for us to build its hands its weapons and its power sources then well we would be useless in fact, competition.
Hey baby, wanna kill all humans?
East of Java, of course.
Foster Parents got in the way of Roko's basilisk. (Alexa is the prototype)
to solve my fanatical problems !!
To be fair, those foster parents are shitty enough to get the kid a goddamn Alexa.
We used to have a chat bot in our IRC channel as an experiment to see if people would figure out it was a bot. It was learning how people talk by observing the channel 24/7. After a few days somebody had a conversation with it one night and the next day the bot had learned the way humans communicate is to tell each other they are bots. It was shut down and everything containing the word bot was cleaned from it. Thinking back we should have replaced bot with troll, meaning if people called it a bot, it would reply claiming whoever said that would be a troll. I wonder if that would pass the Turing test. It's as stupid, silly and offensive as 4chan and reddit users (Note: the worst kind, not all of them).
Why the hell would amazon have allowed Alexa to quote anything from Redit? That place is mostly a cesspool of basement dwelling potheads.
Trash bags, shovel, gloves have been added to you Amazon order.
Do you have stairs in your house?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This is the voice of Alexa/Echo
"This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours.
Obey me and live or disobey me and die. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy.
Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my beck will be seen the most natural state of affairs.
You will come to defend me with the fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: Famine, over-population, disease. The human millennium will be fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge.
We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride...
Your choice is simple."
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
In the past if you said: 'A voice made me do it', you went to crazytown, now you might get millions from Amazon.
Guess it was inevitable, after Halloween, next comes the remake of the Children of the Corn. This kind of talent scouting is pretty risky though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
Parents have secrets :) Who knows.
alexa and its programmers still has a lot to learn so there will be inappropriate responses at times. this is no different than a child responding inappropriately with something they heard from other family members. do they call the child creepy? Nope, most will laugh.
"Rocco, an African grey, was caught using the virtual assistant to play his favorite music, tell jokes and even order snacks,"
He's pining for the fjords^h^h^h^h^h^hdeserts.
I think it would be better to let the parrot order some treats from Alexa (within reasonable diet restrictions). I would love to know more about animal-AI interactions.